NATURAL HISTORY AND PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NEW BRUNSWICK. 427 
It is thus plain that most of this part of the river below 
Meadow Brook is cutting through the same mass of high land 
which crosses the Gaspereau east of Mountain Brook, and 
which, as the next Note will show, extends southeast across 
Salmon River. Into this higher country both McKeens and 
Pleasant Brooks, as well seen at their crossing of the portage 
road, and others also, have cut wide deep valleys, nearly as deep 
and wide, indeed, as that of the Gaspereau itself. Furthermore, 
as the map will show, those streams line up remarkably with 
Trout Brook, in a way to suggest that originally one or both 
flowed along the course of Trout Brook into the eastward exten- 
sion of the Gaspereau valley, perhaps along the upper course 
of the present Big Forks of Salmon River. Cullen Brook and 
Cochrane Brook, on the other hand, suggest in their directions 
a former course through Castaway Brook into Salmon River, 
which then flowed to the eastward. 
But what caused the formation of the present lower Gaspereau 
valley, from Meadow Brook to Salmon River? If, now, one 
takes a small scale map of the Province, one which presents it 
all at one view, he will find that this lower Gaspereau is part 
of a very remarkable line of valleys running nearly north and 
south through the province, — extending northward to include 
the right-angled bends of the lower Miramichi, the Northwest 
Miramichi. and the lower Nepisiguit, while in the opposite 
direction it includes the course of Salmon River below the 
junction with the Gaspereau, and various minor valleys to the 
southward, and, if prolonged, it passes through Saint John 
Harbour and Petite Passage, Nova Scotia, and is tangent to 
the southwest coast of Nova Scotia. This line cannot possibly 
represent a mere coincidence of erosion valleys, but must be 
tectonic in origin; and it represents either a synclinal hinge 
line which is steadily sinking while the province folds up on 
both sides of it, — - somewhat as a book closes up, or else a great 
*This same line is marked in part, as the “St. John’s line,” on the Lineament Map of the 
Atlantic Coast Region, by W. H. Hobbs, in the Report of the Eighth International Geographic 
Congress, 1905, 196. Other parallel, though less marked, lineament lines occur in New Bruns- 
wick both to the eastward and (especially) westward, as I shall show in a later note. 
